


Keeping Austin Weird

by CG (NYCScribbler)



Category: World War Z - Max Brooks
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-22
Updated: 2010-12-22
Packaged: 2017-10-13 23:38:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,021
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/142952
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NYCScribbler/pseuds/CG
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Sure, maybe we didn’t need that much help, but those lines on the map don’t mean shit to a zombie."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Keeping Austin Weird

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Pear](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pear/gifts).



> Dear recipient, I hope you enjoy this. I’m afraid I’ve never been to Austin, but I know a smidge more than I do about Prague.
> 
> It appears we've been revealed, so now I can thank ontd_political for everything I needed to know about Texas politics; I'm 99% sure that that's where I picked up "Governor Goodhair". Thanks also to my favorite UT-Austin grad student who studied in Prague for loosely inspiring Kitty, to sportsfan9 and the Tropers for loosely inspiring the YouTube footnote, and to my favorite six-one of broad-shouldered Texas badass for loosely inspiring Aricia.

**[Kitty McMillan doesn’t look like one of the most legendary sharpshooters in Texas. In her denim jacket, UT t-shirt, and oil-stained jeans, with her dirty blonde hair tied back in a ponytail and freckles all over her oval face, she looks like the graduate student she was before the outbreak and will be again in the next academic year. We meet in her off-campus apartment, which shows all the hallmarks of pre-outbreak reinforcement. Her slow drawl is deceptively relaxing.]**

Zombies on the streets of Austin didn’t used to be a big deal. Shoot, I did a couple of zombie walks back when they were still something halfway between a joke and a social statement. Got myself a prize one year- third place, Best Groan. Me and my friends, we were so sure that we were ready for the zombie apocalypse if it ever came. We had all the movies, the survival guide, anything you could think of.

And I’m not sure we were wrong. We’d all laid in supplies, baseball bats, batteries, miners’ helmets- those were Jesse’s idea, of course, he did his undergrad at UTEP. We had a meeting place set up **[she gestures at the apartment]**. We just didn’t factor in the folks who _weren’t_ ready, and they damn near did us in- not with the virus, but with something worse: good old fear and panic. When everyone around you’s running around like a headless chicken, it gets into your head.

And my parents’ generation- maybe even yours- wasn’t near as ‘net-savvy as ours. People all over the country- all over the world- were blogging, taking pictures and posting them, putting up videos on YouTube or wherever else they could once YouTube banned them after the suit [1]. I knew this girl from LJ, cottoncandytiger, who holed up in a Wal-Mart and streamed video of their whole fight with the zombies [2].

Shoot, that still sounds weird.

But all these videos, all these pictures, all these panicked accounts people were tapping out on their phones while they were hiding... they had to come from somewhere, and every time one of us heard from somewhere near where they had family, they would freak out. It hurt hard.

 **  
_And your family?_   
**

Texan by the grace of God, thank you very much. That's how I learned to shoot. Dad used to drive us out as far as he could and he'd spend hours just showing me proper stance, or how to keep from being knocked back by the recoil. He'd fire off a shot, then ask me what he did wrong. Started when I was thirteen. Didn't hold a loaded gun until I was fifteen. Didn't shoot until I was sixteen.

Took some self-defense classes in college, too. Zombies didn't used to be the drooling, staggering monsters a girl worried about on campus.

After that... in all of this... it was just discipline. Shots anywhere else wouldn't work, so you go for the headshot. You ever read Warmbrunn's essay? The one where he talks about the brain? Yeah, you seemed like that kind. Keep your machine going by taking out another one. No room for fear or doubt, no matter where it can squeeze in.

 **  
_And your family?_   
**

Dogged son of a gun, ain't you? If you're looking for tragedy, you won't find it here. Far as I know, they're all right, even if they high-tailed it past the Rocky Line to San Diego. Can’t say I blame them, not after they heard from Aunt Karen. Uncle Andy was taking my cousin Matt to his first game at Boston Garden, or whatever it’s called. She still blames the New York fans.[3]

I was kinda glad to see them go, if I gotta be honest with you. I didn’t want them worrying about me, I didn’t want to have to worry about them. I figured it they could get somewhere safe, either north or west, they could take care of themselves, and I knew I could take care of myself. If they’d stayed, mom would have tried to make her way here, and I wouldn’t want that on my conscience. We had enough to do trying to organize here, and Lord, whoever compared anything to herding cats never tried to get college students to listen. Soon as someone made suggestions on how to survive, they were the Man, and no one wanted to listen to the Man.

I couldn’t hardly stand the stupidity. Here we were fighting off the undead and waiting for the swarms to make their way up from Mexico, and some idiot wants to complain about the insistence on long sleeves? We couldn’t give a pig’s fart how hot you were- not being bitten and turning into a zombie was way the hell more important. So a bunch of us peeled off the rest and forted up the Main Building, and I gave in to the temptation to relive a little history up the clock tower when Mr. Bare Skin came back with about a dozen new zombie buddies. Let me tell you, I really wished I had a scope.

But the worst, the worst of the worst of the worst, were the Greens. Now, I’ve got nothing against the environment. I live in it and it’s useful. But if I’m choosing between my continued survival and the betterment of the earth, well, I like living. You do what you got to do, you know? Maybe I shouldn’t be proud of that, but I’m still here. Lot of people who can’t say that. And I’m not talking about the real environmentalists, the ones who hooked up the solar panels and built the windmills and figured out how to recycle all our shit. I’m talking about the ones who thought Solanum was Mother Earth’s way of punishing humans for what we’d done to the planet, that animals just died from it because she was being merciful, and that plants weren’t affected because... shit, I don’t even know, okay? I couldn’t follow that much crazy.

A couple of them were crazier than even the crazies. I remember this one guy who threw himself out of a building, screaming that he was going to be punished for his sins of being a human, right into a bunch of zombies. We had a couple of quislings, too, though I don’t know if they just checked out or if they were trying to become zombies or what the hell. That’s the useful thing about the apocalypse. Insanity and stupidity pretty much self-select out of the gene pool. Sure, you get some lucky idiots, but not nearly as many. Of course, it helps when you don’t have to _self_ -select.

 **  
_What does that mean?_   
**

Look, it’s one thing if one crazy idiot wants to kill himself like the zombie boy. It’s another thing if some crazy idiot wants to get the rest of us killed. The governor... well, he’d always been trying to keep the government out of Texas, and I guess he thought he had his chance to run things the way he thought they should be run. And I can’t blame him right in the beginning. We don’t get nice convenient permafrosts in the winter the way they do up north, so we had problems coming from all sides, and the feds were still establishing their beachheads in Honolulu and on the other side of the Rocky Line. Someone had to get shit done, you know?

But we’re not in the Black Hills here. And when the government did finally have its shit together, and they wanted to use the military bases to refuel, or as sortie points, or get involved, we were ready to welcome them with open arms. There were some as thought we’d done well enough on our own, didn’t owe anyone anything and didn’t need to help anyone. Stupid. So stupid. Sure, maybe we didn’t need that much help, but those lines on the map don’t mean shit to a zombie. And if you get bitten, it doesn’t matter whether that zombie was from Texas, Arkansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, or the moon. You’re still infected and you’re still screwed. So anything that means less zombies is a good idea, even if it means you have to swallow your pride and play nice with the feds.

Hell, I don’t know. Maybe they were just scared of a black president. Didn’t want to be bossed around by one of “them”. Sometimes I wonder how Austin ended up the state capital, since we don’t seem to share any of the same values that our politicians do.

The straw that broke the camel’s back was when what was left of the state government started making rumblings about not letting AG South and Central cross our borders, like we were the Lone Star Republic all over again. I couldn’t believe it the first I heard of it. I figured they had to be joking. No one could be that stupid, not even Governor Goodhair. But the rumblings kept on, and we realized they were.

There’s a law in Austin, or at least there used to be, about buildings in certain parts of town not being allowed to be too tall so you can see the state capitol. That makes it useful as a vantage point- and as a place to make things happen. You can see anything from there, and anyone can see anything you do up there. So a bunch of us from the school marched in there, took the legislature and the governor up to the top and asked if they might kindly want to reconsider their plan not to let the well-armed, well-prepared, nicely seasoned ground force go after the zombies for us instead of us shouldering the load. And a good number of them saw sense from that vantage point, or maybe it was zombies, who knows? And a few of those folks, including our esteemed governor, bless his heart... well, you can’t say they didn’t stick to their guns.

So Aricia- this big tough black girl who’d gotten out of New Orleans and wouldn’t talk about it- told ‘em they had two options: they could go and not come back, or they could go and come back. And when one of them started mouthing off at her, she shot him in the head. “So you ain’t comin’ back,” she said in this deep voice like she was passing judgment on him. The next one who gave her trouble was good old Governor Goodhair, bless his heart. She threw him out the window.

"This one's comin' back," she announced after a few minutes of looking out the window.

Swear to God, I thought I heard them eating him. Might just have been the stress, though. At least we didn't have to do too many other demonstrations. The next governor was a bit more sensible.

I did a little volunteer work with AG South. Practiced my shooting a bit more- boy, that SIR is a nice piece to handle, isn't it? Soon as they hit the state line, though, I was heading back this way. I wanted to come home. I love this place, you know? It's ours. We're making it ours again. A lot of folks are coming back to the school. Know how I know things are getting back to weird?

 **  
_Not normal?_   
**

This is Austin. Weird is normal and we like it that way. Anyway, things are getting back to our kind of weird 'cause one of the kids from the theater department's putting on a play about a guy who gets a skin graft from an infected donor, and what's going on inside his head as he gets more and more infected- how he tries to fight it and when he stops fighting it. Suppose that's how you know you've beaten an enemy- you start to feel bad for 'em.

 

[1] _Smith vs. United States, 567 U.S. 103_.

[2] See [interview with Marlena Ellis](http://archiveofourown.org/works/32927).

[3] The Boston outbreak is believed to have begun at a hockey game between the Boston Bruins and the New York Rangers.


End file.
